The Bloj

What I’m reading 12

Posted on May 27th, 2006 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, General/Misc..

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8796107381752803842&q=rube+goldberg
From Digg: http://419eater.com/, these people apparently bait 419s, everyone’s favorite internet scam.
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/05/26/608007.aspx - no more dialog boxes!
flow|state: Fonts! This one has inspired me to look into the possibility of a designer for dynamic fonts. I don’t know if this is actually feasible, so I’m just looking into it for now. But here is one possibility. Here are two others, courtesy of Google’s Theorem.
Every command for Windows XP/NT, or at least a lot of them.
New! http://www.phonespelling.com/. I almost wrote this myself; thank goodness for GT.

Insecure communication

Posted on May 23rd, 2006 by Tim.
Categories: General/Misc..

I saw a link today to an article that describes a “secure phone”. In the article they state:

First off, you need two phones. When you place a secure call (you can also place regular calls), they perform a 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman shared secret exchange, to generate a secret 128-bit key. This process takes between 10 to 30 seconds. Only the two phones share this unique key: it is generated before each call, and deleted after each call. Once the key is generated, conversation is subsequently encrypted and your call is secure.

All I have to say is… wow. This is the biggest load of BS I’ve seen in a long time… To explain why this is BS, here’s what the DH algorithm does, in a nutshell: Two parties wish to have a shared secret to use a symmetric encryption algorithm (usually). But these two parties have never met, and they must only communicate over an insecure line. The DH algorithm provides a method such that two parties can negotiate a shared secret over an insecure line and maintain secrecy from eavesdroppers. So, in theory, what they are saying is not false. Anyone passively listening to the DH key exchange and subsequent conversation will be unable to decipher the communication. However, there is a fatal flaw. The DH key exchange is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. Alice calls Bob, and begins to establish a shared secret using DH. However, Alice and Bob are unaware that Trudy is in the middle, relaying messages between them. As a result, there are two seperate DH key exchanges completed, one between Alice and Trudy, and one between Trudy and Bob. As a result, Trudy can simply decrypt all messages from Alice and re-encrypt the messages for Bob. In the scenario of telecoms, this scenario is not far-fetched, and is probably trivially accomplished.

There is another downside to this phone. Encrypted traffic has very high entropy. What this means is that encrypted traffic is easily distinguished from unencrypted traffic. This is something that the chinese people have known for a while. If you’re trying to hide something, encryption merely makes you more noticable.

The system they should really be implementing is a public-key cryptography system with a PKI (public key infrastructure) and it should be a standard feature of every phone. Just my $0.02

3 comments.

NSA “Wiretapping”

Posted on May 11th, 2006 by Tim.
Categories: General/Misc..

Do I think the NSA “wiretapping” is legal? Probably. Should it be legal? Maybe… Maybe not. Regardless of your opinion of the ethical/legal/moral implications of the “wiretapping”, you should agree with me that the response we’ve seen in the media and the outrage we’ve heard is ridiculous.

For one thing, it isn’t wiretapping. NSA simply took our phone records. The media has been implying that our enitre phone conversations have been recorded and forwarded to the NSA. In reality, the information is meerly the record of who called who, when, and for how long. The NSA wasn’t the first to get these records. Did you ever stop and ask yourself why they save this information in the first place? The telephone companies have been selling our records for years. But suddenly, NSA is the buyer. Only… they don’t pay cash. They just ask “nicely”.

What’s the difference? Advertisers profile us with spyware, with web bugs, and cookies. And for what purpose? To more effectively advertise. The NSA decides to collect similar information. And for what purpose? Hopefully, to protect us.

I’m not saying the NSA should have that information. But frankly, we can’t stop the “bad guys” (e.g. DoubleClick). If we aren’t stopping the “bad guys”, why should we stop the “good guys” (e.g. NSA… we hope)? Personally, I don’t think either parties should have our private information, but frankly, NSA has significantly more justification. I find it ridiculous that there is an uproar about the NSA’s use of our private information, and yet barely a peep is heard about the more aggregious use of our private information, by private corporations.

11 comments.

Comparison: Apple vs. Nintendo

Posted on May 10th, 2006 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Games, General/Misc..

	Apple:	Nintendo:
Market Share:	About 3-4% of the PC market[1], but a whopping ~77.9% of the portable music player market[2]	Third with about 17.9% of the U.S. game console market[3], but a combined 64.5% of the portable game player market[4]
Product lineup:	Has a smaller variety of software than its Windows competitors; much of this software is developed in-house, by Apple itself.[5]	Relies much more heavily on games developed in-house, particularly the Mario and Zelda franchises.[6], [7]
Advertising:	Heavy advertising campaign focuses on differentiating itself from the competition, to appear like the more appealing option to the general public. [8]	Well known for a strategy of reaching out to the so-called casual gamer, typically de-emphasizing the traditional market. [9]
Publicity:	Still positive, for now. [9]	As of now, still looking up. [10], [11]
Products:	White as you could possibly imagine.